As you can assume, when I’m not doing my homework, attending class, bartending, or literally anything else, I’m playing video games. I have a long history with gaming, and my history with the popular games made by From Software is less than brief. I was hesitant to dive into any of their acclaimed titles until around 5 years ago in 2017, when I bought Bloodborne (2015) for the first time. I was taken aback and thought to myself, “Oh man this shit is hard”, so I took it back to GameStop the same day. Still intrigued by the game however, I figured I’d just watch a walkthrough, and realized that I had missed an important step and lacked general knowledge on how to approach this kind of game to begin with. I went back for that copy soon after and to this day, Bloodborne remains among one of my favorite games of all time.
My experience of Bloodborne led me to venture into some of their other games, and weirdly enough I started with Dark Souls III (2016). I’m not too sure why I started with the last game in it’s trilogy, but looking back now it was both a blessing and a mistake. A blessing because it made me more skillful in the game, but a mistake because I was going in blind, and realized I may not have taken the experience or the world’s story as I should have.
I quit that game after some few months, and years later, when Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice came out in 2019, I knew from there that this developer stood above most for me. After Sekiro came Elden Ring (2022); another great game that I’m pretty far into, but not quite done with yet.
Recently, I’ve taken the time to reflect and decided now was the time to leap into their breakthrough title, Dark Souls (2010). After beating the game, which took several days, I refrained from jumping into the next entry, Dark Souls II (2014), and decided to replay through the game with the inventory earned in my first playthrough, something in gaming known as new game plus (or NG+).
I discovered not only did I manage to miss 2 entire areas with unique enemies and boss fights, I missed the game’s entire DLC, which took a youtube guide to get to, and is as difficult as it can get. I would recommend at least one of From Softwares titles to anyone, but I would strongly recommend starting with this one. It just feels wrong jumping into it after experiencing 4 of From’s titles, and if I could experience this game along with the others for the first time again, I’d give anything to do so.